Monthly Archives: May, 2024
Christian Günther, ‘Compensating Injuries Through the British Welfare State: Arriving at a Coherent System of No-Fault Compensation’
ABSTRACT The British welfare state exceptionally steps in to compensate those who have suffered injury without proof of fault – individual or collective. Relevant, well-established schemes include: the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme, the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme, and the Industrial Injuries Disablement Benefit scheme. This contribution provides an overarching understanding […]
‘No ink, no issue: can you enforce a contract you didn’t sign?’
A joint venture company was able to enforce a joint venture agreement despite not being a direct party or signatory to it. Canon Medical Systems, a manufacturer of medical imaging equipment, entered into an agreement with The Imaging Centre to create a new joint venture company, TIC Mobile. Under the agreement, CMS would sell transportable […]
‘Reorienting American Real Property to its Egalitarian Goals’
Jessica A Shoemaker, ‘Re-Placing Property’, 94 University of Chicago Law Review (forthcoming, 2024), available at SSRN (31 August 2023). In ‘Re-Placing Property’, Jessica A Shoemaker demonstrates the extent to which our legal rules about property have allowed real property ownership to become, in many cases, paradoxically completely divorced from place attachment. Drawing from disciplines such […]
Li and Schütte, ‘The proposal for a revised Product Liability Directive: The emperor’s new clothes?’
ABSTRACT On September 28, 2022, the European Commission presented the long-awaited proposal for a revised Product Liability Directive (PLD). By adapting rules and concepts to digitalization and circular economy, the revised PLD aims to ensure that the damage that defective products caused can be remedied adequately. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the substantive […]
Andrew Gold, ‘The Elegance of Private Law’
ABSTRACT This chapter is a contribution to a festschrift volume in honor of the late Stephen A Smith. It will assess Smith’s deservedly canonical interpretive methodology, with a focus on his coherence criterion. Under this approach, we should seek an account of a private law field – tort, contract, fiduciary law, property – that shows […]
Erik Encarnacion, ‘Making Whole, Making Better, and Accommodating Resilience’
ABSTRACT The conventional story about compensatory damages is that they aim to make plaintiffs whole, but not better off. This make-whole ideal implies that courts should subtract material gains from compensatory awards because otherwise plaintiffs would be unjustly enriched. This article undermines this story in three ways. First, it highlights an oft-overlooked point: that sometimes […]
‘Should the EU unify copyright laws?’
Should the EU unify the copyright laws of its Member States and introduce, over thirty years after the start of the harmonization process, a unitary copyright title? The short answer is: yes. And that will be unavoidable too. The real question is therefore another: how to go about doing that? In order to answer this, […]
Jennifer Nadler, ‘Impossibility and Frustration’
INTRODUCTION A doctrine that discharges contractual obligations due to changes in the world that occur after contract formation presents a theoretical puzzle. As a present commitment to do something in the future, a contract necessarily involves the risk that circumstances will change, making performance more difficult or more expensive and the bargain consequently less profitable […]
Zipursky and Goldberg, ‘Getting the Law Right: An Essay in Honor of Aaron Twerski’
ABSTRACT Written in honor of the great torts scholar Aaron Twerski, this article critically analyzes disturbing developments in New York negligence law as it applies to police who injure innocent bystanders. With the New York Court of Appeals’ 2022 decision in Ferreira v City of Binghamton as a focal point, it argues that Ferreira and […]
Carleen Zubrzycki, ‘Torts (?) Arms Races: Abortion and Beyond’
ABSTRACT The Supreme Court’s decision to eradicate constitutional protections for abortion has led to an array of new civil actions, from opponents and proponents of abortion alike, as both sides have turned to novel causes of action to promote their agendas. On the one side, states like Texas rely on expansive, bounty-hunter style causes of […]